My Milkshake Brings ... Embarrassment

The Summer of 2013, I started my first job ... I'm just going to say it was a fast food restaurant, not which one.

The first few weeks I was working, the milkshake machine was down (and/or we didn't have any milkshake mix in the inventory), so I didn't get a lot of initial practice with how to make milkshakes. How they work though is you pull the handle down on the machine, then you have to watch it and lift the lever again ... or else you'll get milkshake everywhere. (Remember this fact for later, it's important!)

I mostly worked as a cashier at the front of the restaurant, but occasionally I would get placed on drive thru (not my favourite thing, it's not easy, and it's the reason why I have a lot of respect for drive thru workers now!). One day, maybe a month or so into working at this restaurant, my supervisor/trainer went home at 3pm and my manager claimed she was going to help me until my shift ended at 4pm ... but instead, she left me alone, for HALF AN HOUR! I was working cash at the inside of the building AND the drive thru.

Thankfully, I don't think anyone came inside during this half-hour. I did, however, have four people come to the drive thru, one after the other. (If you've never worked in fast food before, the headset beeps when someone pulls up to the takeout box ... so I'd finish talking to one customer, they'd pull away, and my headset instantly beeped because someone was right behind them.)

One of the four customers ordered milkshakes -- everything happened so fast, it's all a blur now (plus this was 8 years ago); I don't remember the exact order of events. What I do remember is pulling the milkshake lever down at one point ... and walking away from it, to input a customer's order into the till and/or get the rest of a customer's order into a takeout bag. You can only imagine the mess on the floor when I finally realized what I'd done ...

The cherry on top? My mistake ended up emptying the milkshake machine. The inventory is in the basement. I had people at the drive thru speaker talking to me, people at the window waiting for their order, and I had to somehow go downstairs to get the milkshake mix in order to refill the milkshake machine ... and then clean up the mess on the floor (and hopefully not slip on it in the process of doing everything else!).

I am SO GRATEFUL to this day that the person starting at 4pm came in early, and offered to take care of the drive thru while I retrieved the milkshake mix and clean up the milkshake off the floor.

While I was in the middle of cleaning the mess, however, my manager decided to make an appearance, taking note of everything that was happening (maybe she asked one of us to explain; again, I don't fully remember anymore) ... and then she turned around and went back to her office.

"I'm so fired," I thought.

4pm rolled around, I went to her office and apologized profusely. She cut me off halfway through my apology, saying "I had to walk away because I was laughing so hard!"

... "So I'm not fired?"

Evidently, I wasn't. I even came back the next Summer, with glowing recommendations from the people I worked with the first Summer.

I still share this story every time it comes up in conversation -- "What's your most embarrassing story?". My best friend and I were traveling with a tour group in Europe, 2016, and we had to share our most embarrassing story with a busload of people ... using a microphone. I don't know which was more embarrassing: living the story in 2013, or sharing the story via microphone three years later!

I can laugh about it all now though ... sometimes.